Xiayin Wang / Royal Scottish National Orchestra / Peter Oundjian AMERICAN PIANO CONCERTOS

                                                  AMERICAN PIANO CONCERTOS

Xiayin Wang / Royal Scottish National Orchestra / Peter Oundjian TCHAIKOVSKY Piano Concerto No.1 - Piano Concerto No. 3 SCRIABIN Piano Concerto

Following her acclaimed recording of Tchaikovskys Piano Concerto No. 2 in 2016 (Editors Choice, Gramophone), Xiayin Wang here completes the trio with No. 1 and the posthumously published No. 3, alongside Scriabins only concerto. Whether Tchaikovsky gave his consent to the virtuoso Alexander Ziloti to revise his Piano Concerto No. 1 is unknown, but Wang here presents the lesser-recorded original version. Piano Concerto No. 3 was originally begun as a symphony, all of which except the first movement was ultimately abandoned; that surviving movement was later completed as a singlemovement concert work for piano and orchestra. Scriabin finished his piano concerto in only a few days, although it took months to orchestrate it before the 1897 premiere. Sensitively played by Wang, the concerto shows a naïve charm that even Scriabin, at his most translucent, would struggle to recapture once his career got underway.

Jan Vogler / Mira Wang / Royal Scottish National Orchestra / Peter Oundjian DOUBLE CONCERTOS

On 11 May 2018, German cellist Jan Vogler will release his new CD with Sony Classical: Together with violinist Mira Wang and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra conducted by Peter Oundjian they have recorded double concertos by Johannes Brahms, Wolfgang Rihm and John Harbison.

Through Jan Vogler’s initiative two renowned contemporary composers – American John Harbison and German Wolfgang Rihm – were each to compose a work for violin, violoncello and orchestra, which will now be released as world premiere recording.
Both pieces – Wolfgang Rihm’s “Duo Concerto” as well as John Harbison’s “Double Concerto” – were premiered by Jan Vogler and his wife, violinist Mira Wang in the USA.

Jan Vogler and Mira Wang about this new recording:
"Brahms’ singular master work stood alone for over a century, without notable challenge by new compositions for the same unique instrumentation. We are happy and proud to have helped to bring two beautiful and strong double concertos to life. Wolfgang Rihm’s virtuous double concerto in one movement and John Harbison‘s poetic and symphonic work are framing Brahms’ double concerto on this CD. For us it feels like a completed circle, from the first idea through the creations and premieres, to the presentation on this recording."

Doric String Quartet / Royal Scottish National Orchestra / Peter Oundjian JOHN ADAMS Naive and Sentimental Music - Absolute Jest

As part of his final year as Music Director and following a two-season celebration of the Orchestra’s 125th anniversary, Peter Oundjian and the RSNO here present their second recording of music by John Adams, with the exceptional participation of the Doric String Quartet.

Written for a large orchestra including six percussionists, keyboard sampler, and amplified steel-string guitar, Naive and Sentimental Music is a sweepingly symphonic masterpiece, full of contrasts and clashes. It reflects the dichotomy between ‘naive’ and ‘sentimental’ poetry as analysed by Friedrich Schiller in his 1795 essay Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung, as well as the ‘bipolar’ musical life of Esa-Pekka Salonen, the dedicatee of this piece, who conducted the first performance with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1999.

Absolute Jest is a large-scale scherzo for amplified string quartet and orchestra, heavily inspired by the music of Beethoven, which Adams has always deeply admired. The quartet of soloists, a late addition to the score, emphasises the echoes of Beethoven’s music (mainly his string quartets) and   facilitates a ‘hyperspace rate’ of virtuosity, which the Doric String Quartet here perfectly demonstrates.

Xiayin Wang / Royal Scottish National Orchestra / Peter Oundjian TCHAIKOVSKY Piano Concerto No. 2 KHACHATURIAN Piano Concerto

It’s always a pleasure when, like Fry’s Five Boys Chocolate (if you’re old enough to remember), realisation exceeds anticipation. From the first bar (no chocolate pun intended), you know that this brilliant Chinese-American pianist is the business. As on her earlier concerto disc of Copland, Barber and Gershwin with the same partners, she leads from the front throughout to exhilarating effect.

For those to whom such things are important (as I know they are from a review I penned last year of Denis Matsuev in the Tchaikovsky Second), the score is played complete in its original version – ie no cuts in the first movement and with the 16 bars included at the end of the second movement which Tchaikovsky removed in its revised form. To help us find our way during the lengthy first movement, Chandos has helpfully added three entry points. The two soloists in the second movement are credited, unlike those on Matsuev’s recording, who, however, I marginally prefer for their more espressivo solos.

The Khachaturian is, presumably, a replacement for Chandos of its well-regarded recording with Constantine Orbelian, Neeme Järvi and the same orchestra. Sumptuously engineered, the newcomer, unlike several other much-vaunted versions (Berezovsky) in inferior sound (Kapell, Lympany), takes Khachaturian at his word as far as tempi are concerned, markedly similar to the live performance conducted by the composer with Nikolai Petrov in 1977. Chandos, as before, has gone to the trouble of hiring a flexatone for the spectral second movement (the player, alas, is not credited). Xiayin Wang plays the stamina-sapping solo part with all the conviction and exuberance needed, though no one has ever quite matched the climax of the first movement cadenza as recorded by Peter Katin, the LSO and Hugo Rignold back in 1959 – a thrilling moment ‘captured in one lucky take,’ so Katin once told me. If you do not have a recording of the Tchaikovsky, then this is up with the very best; likewise the Khachaturian. Paired together, it’s a no-brainer. (Jeremy Nicholas / Gramophone)

Xiayin Wang / Royal Scottish National Orchestra / Peter Oundjian AMERICAN PIANO CONCERTOS

The young Chinese-born pianist Xiayin Wang, now resident in the USA, has been enthralling audiences worldwide and gaining ever greater international acclaim with her winning combination of consummate technical brilliance, fine musicianship, and personal verve. Equally renowned as a recitalist and chamber musician, she is here the soloist in three great piano concertos by the American composers George Gershwin, Aaron Copland, and Samuel Barber, performed with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra under Peter Oundjian.

The Concerto in F by Gershwin, composed in 1925, represents one of his finest syntheses of the classical and jazz traditions. His extraordinary skill as a tunesmith is heard in full force within the concerto’s three movements, the work expressing his ‘unabashed delight in the stridency, the gaucheries, the joy and excitement of life as it is lived right here and now’. Xiayin Wang has already shown her natural affinity with Gershwin’s music in her previous Chandos release, playing Earl Wild’s Gershwin transcriptions with ‘verve, brilliance and sheer delight’, as American Record Guide put it.

Copland’s Piano Concerto from 1927 is another work influenced by jazz. At the time of its premiere, comparisons were inevitably drawn between this and Gershwin’s Concerto but Copland dismissed the influence of Gershwin. Rather, his style reflects the jazz elements used by composers living in Paris in the 1920s, such as Milhaud and Stravinsky. The work’s two distinct sections reflect what Copland believed to be the two basic moods of jazz, ‘the slow blues and the snappy number’.

Barber’s Pulitzer Prize winning Concerto for Piano dates from 1962. Like the other two works on the disc it shows the diversity of influence in American music in the twentieth century. Moments of harmonic ambiguity and muscular dissonance reflect Barber’s interest in Russian music, a subtle jazz influence enriching the musical language, especially in the rhythms of the compact finale. The music manifests a dramatic and rhetorical style, however, that is deeply rooted in a romanticism which pervades all of Barber’s output.